Jarnail Singh, 43, lights lamps beside the tubewell on his farm, a day after Bandi Chhor Diwas, which falls on the same day as Diwali, in Nihal Singh Wala in Moga, Punjab, India. November 13, 2023.
Singh claimed to be one of the last farmers standing in the rapidly expanding town limits and was certain that he would be the last one to continue harvesting despite the challenges.
Heavy Lies the Grain
India extracts more groundwater than any other country, surpassing even the combined usage of the U.S. and China. The primary driver of this demand is agriculture, especially in the northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana.
The origins of this thirst can be traced back to the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Battling persistent food shortages and dependence on grain imports, Indian planners hoped to attain self-sufficiency in food production. They provided farmers with high-yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides and also helped mechanize farming tools and equipment.
In Punjab, farmers were encouraged to shift from traditional crops such as pulses, maize, and oilseeds to rice and wheat. As a result, the area under wheat cultivation more than doubled between 1960 and 2023, with production rising more than ninefold. Rice cultivation saw even steeper increases, with land use increasing nearly 14-fold and an astonishing 58 times more production of the grain. Today, Punjab, which represents 1.53% of India’s geographical area, produces about sixteen percent of the country’s wheat and eleven percent of its rice.
Photographed between 2016 and 2024, the project focuses on the impact of decades of intense monocropping on Punjab’s agriculture, water resources, and farm debt. It also examines how chemical runoff from the fields pollutes groundwater in the villages, leading to widespread cancers and kidney disorders among farming communities.
Reporting on this project between 2023 and 2024 was supported by a grant from the National Geographic Society. The work has appeared in The Caravan Magazine and Undark.
Kanak is Sanskrit for gold. In Punjabi, however, it means wheat.
Wheat lit up by the lights of a harvester in Sema in Bathinda, Punjab, India. April 27, 2024.
Labh Singh, 65, is a small farmer with 2.15 acres of land in Khiala Kalan in Mansa, Punjab, India. November 22, 2017.
During the Green Revolution, farmers in Punjab were encouraged to move away from traditional pulses, maize, and vegetables and to grow wheat and rice paddy instead.
Sukhvinder Singh Sidhu, 28, walks through his field to ensure even watering of his wheat crop at night when it is his turn to draw water from the canal in Gehri Devi Nagar in Bathinda, Punjab, India. January 23, 2024.
Farmworker Buta Singh, 55, washes his hands after spraying a cocktail of fungicide, insecticide, and nutrient supplements to improve paddy yield Nangal Kalan in Mansa, Punjab, India, on September 29, 2023.
The district received 45 per cent less rainfall than average during the monsoon season, which resulted in the underdevelopment of crops and lower yields.
Farmers from 130 villages that have no access to canal water and are dependent on borewells for irrigation burn an effigy during a protest in Dhuri in Sangrur, Punjab, India. October 03, 2023.
Being in the ‘dark zone’ for overexploitation of groundwater, farmers in most villages are not allowed to dig new borewells, and some said they have to leave their lands fallow owing to the lack of water.
Village elders spend an evening at Satth- a platform that serves as a communal space, in Kotra Kalan in Mansa, Punjab, India. November 21, 2017.
A migrant worker from Bihar photographed as he was applying mustard oil over his skin to protect it from the early-winter cold, at a grain market in Bhagu in Bathinda, Punjab, India. November 11, 2023.
Ram Swarup, 50, a farmer, watches the receding waters of the Ghaggar in Sadhuwala in Mansa, Punjab, India. July 26, 2023.
The Ghaggar, a seasonal river, was in spate after receiving heavy inflows from the upper reaches of the Himalayas, attributed to climate change by scientists.
Gurnishan Singh, 45, poses at his home, which was destroyed by the flood waters of the Beas in Bhaini Kadar in Kapurthala, Punjab, India. More than two months after the flood, his four-acre land is still underwater, and he is still waiting for compensation. October 08, 2023.
The floods destroyed standing crops in 18,000 acres around the village and many farmers reported no harvest during the crop season.
Nanku, 14, assists his father Gurbakshan Singh in keeping stray cattle away from the fields in Makha in Mansa, Punjab, India. January 29, 2017.
The family is employed collectively by the village’s farmers and gets paid in wheat, which they sell in the market to meet their expenses.
Paddy stubble set on fire near Sema in Bathinda, Punjab, India. November 06, 2023. Every winter, farm fires in Punjab are blamed for contributing to the dense smog over Delhi.
Representatives of a farmer union hold a press conference at a field where a Happy Seeder has been used in Dhaula in Barnala, Punjab, India. December 11, 2019.
The machine was sold as a solution that mulched paddy stubble while sowing wheat simultaneously, avoiding the need to burn stubble. However, the leaders said such fields, just like the one they were standing on, were prone to severe pest attacks.
A worker harvests cotton on a farm in Thutianwali, Mansa, Punjab, India. January 18, 2017.
The southern part of Punjab was long regarded as the Cotton Belt, but repeated white fly and pink bollworm attacks in the last few years forced many farmers to switch to paddy, which in turn added to the stress on water levels.
Chopped maize, to be used as cattle fodder through the year, being unloaded in a pit outside a farmer’s home in Bhaini Bagha in Mansa, Punjab, India. July 25, 2023.
Over the past few years, many farmers have taken to sowing maize as a third crop during the summer months, resulting in greater groundwater extraction.
Landless farm labourers at a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) work site in Bhaini Bagha in Mansa, Punjab, India. October 01, 2023.
The Act guarantees registrants up to 100 days of work. Though the works are usually carried out when there is no regular work in the fields, the women here said increased mechanisation of farm work, coupled with the shift away from cotton, leaves them without work for most days of the year.
Pooja Rani, 23, and Arun Saxena, 28, during their pre-wedding shoot at Shoot Villa, a location that offers a vintage Punjabi village ambience, among other backdrops, for photo shoots in Bathinda, Punjab, India. November 07, 2023.
A farmer sleeps atop his paddy harvest at the Grain Market in Bathinda, Punjab, India. November 09, 2023.
The previous month, untimely rains across the state damaged standing paddy crops and caused harvested paddy to build up high moisture. Government regulations bar agencies from purchasing paddy with more than 17 percent moisture content, while many farmers report as much as 20 to 24 percent. They either sell it to commission agents who deduct 2 percent from the overall weight to account for excess moisture or wait to sell it at the markets, hoping the grain dries.
After walking door to door to collect milk for the local gurudwara, a group of young men sit in the back of a makeshift pick-up truck in Sukhpura Maur in Barnala, Punjab, India. December 10, 2019.
Baljinder Singh Mann, 27, is a weather blogger from Balloh in Bathinda, Punjab, India and has tremendous reach across Punjab and Punjabi-speaking parts of neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Rajasthan. He had a reach of 2.8M in the preceding 28 days on Facebook and 4.2M views on Instagram. July 27, 2023.
Mann regularly receives messages from farmers seeking advice on when the weather would be good to sow seeds, spray pesticides, etc. He says he has seen drastic changes in the weather patterns in the five years he has been a weather blogger, with the state receiving more rains during the North-Eastern monsoon than the South-Western monsoon and parts of Punjab receiving either more or less rain than usual.
Water gushes out of a freshly installed tube well in Burj Mahema in Bathinda, Punjab, India. April 29, 2024.
Jasvinder Singh, the farmer, lost his monsoon crop of cotton to a pest attack and the winter wheat crop to an unprecedented hailstorm in early March. He hopes the borewell will help him switch to the water-intensive but reliable paddy instead during the monsoons.
Maluck Singh, a registered medical practitioner, has been serving the local community in Lalluana, in Mansa, Punjab, India, for 23 years. October 02, 2023.
Singh, who is very well respected by the villagers, especially for his work during the COVID-19 pandemic, said that he has been observing a higher prevalence of kidney stones, high blood pressure and diabetes, as well as more cancer cases among villagers.
At Phulad in Sangrur, Punjab, India, someone added a Google Maps placemark over the Ghaggar, which flows past the village, as the “Cancer River”.
Bimla Devi, 40, is a cancer survivor from the village who believes that it is indeed the water that caused her stomach cancer two years ago. October 04, 2023.
Chest X-rays being dried at the Acharya Tulsi Memorial Cancer Research Center and Hospital in Bikaner, Rajasthan, where many from Punjab go for cheap and accessible cancer treatment. The train that carried most of these patients was locally referred to as the Cancer Express. November 30, 2016.
Avtar Singh, 30 and Paramjeet Kaur, 30, with their only son Vinaypal Singh, 8, at their home in Joga in Mansa, Punjab, India. July 28, 2023.
Singh’s family owns 10 acres, and following a trend seen across Punjab, the couple decided to have only one son so that their land wouldn’t be further fragmented.
Govarthan Nath, 27, is a behrupiya who dresses up as characters from Indian folklore and walks around in villages in Punjab during the days following Diwali, entertaining kids and accepting gifts from the villagers. Nath, a farmer in Chikli near Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, says he does this for fewer days now as farmer incomes have dwindled, and they are not as generous with gifts as they used to be. Gehri Butter in Bathinda, Punjab, India. November 14, 2023.
Women from farming families gather to make rotis as Seva, voluntary work or service, at the local Gurudwara in Gobindpura in Mansa, Punjab, India. May 08, 2024.
The funeral pyre of RD, an ex-farm worker who died after consuming pesticide, in Nihal Singh Wala in Moga, Punjab, India. November 13, 2023.
Karanjeet Kaur, 37, consoled her husband Ranjit Singh whenever he was worried about Rs. 700,000 (USD 11,000) debt, the result of three years of failed crops, and threatened to kill himself. She ensured that he was never alone, but one day in 2011, he went to the farm and hung himself with his turban. Kaur now works as a farm labourer, providing for her daughter (17) and a son with special needs (16) in Kot Dharmu in Mansa, Punjab, India. January 27, 2017.
A cancer screening camp organised by Homi Bhabha Cancer Hospital from Sangrur in Cheema in Sangrur, Punjab, India. October 07, 2023.
Cancers are widely reported across the state, especially in the south, and many farmers believe the chemicals from the farm are causing them.
Protesting Punjabi farmers remove police barricades put up on one of the roads that lead to the protest site at Singhu outside Delhi, India. December 08, 2020.
In 2020, Punjabi farmers marched to Delhi on their tractors and laid siege to the city’s borders for over a year, protesting against three new farm bills that were passed by the central government. Among the bills’ several contentious clauses, farmers are most worried about the withdrawal of a minimum support price (MSP) for farm produce. They were afraid private players would offer low prices in the absence of a regulatory mechanism, pushing many of them out of farming and eventually leading to corporate takeover of agriculture.
Farmers under a makeshift tent propped up between tractor-trailers at the Tikri protest site.
While the farmers protesting at Singhu come from the wealthier Majha and Doaba regions of Punjab, the ones at Tikri come from Malwa, which also records most of Punjab’s farmer suicides. December 14, 2020.
Protesting farmers take selfies with Punjabi singer Kanwar Garewal at Tikri. The protests have received a great deal of support from singers and artists from the region, and the anger against the Farm Bills is being channelled through music. Ailaan, one of Grewals’s songs that went on to become a protest anthem, was later taken down by YouTube, prompting complaints of yielding to pressure from the Indian government. December 14, 2020.
Barricades put up by Haryana’s police blocking the highway at the state’s border with Punjab at Khanauri. May 10, 2024.
On February 13, 2024, hundreds of farmers set off to lay siege to Delhi’s borders, demanding a legal guarantee for MSP on all crops. However, Haryana police stopped them at the state’s borders at Shambhu and Khanauri. They have remained at the borders ever since.
The horse of a Nihang warrior Sikh at the farmer protest site at Punjab’s border with Haryana at Khanauri. May 09, 2024.
Kaur Singh, 60, from Lehra Mohabbat in Bathinda at the farmer protest site at Punjab’s border with Haryana at Khanauri. May 10, 2024.